The average family exists only on paper. -- -- Sylvia Porter, U.S. economist

Attractive thirtysome-things, Heather and David are the happily married parents of Rissa, an engaging and precocious six-year-old on whom, most days, the sun rises and sets. They live in Cobourg, where the welcomes are warm and the values are small-town. He's a high-school teacher, she's a stay-at-home mom.

They have a Chevy minivan, an aged Toyota Tercel, two cats with clever names, a dog and a mortgage. A Canadian flag flutters on the front porch of their two-storey red-brick home.

As contemporary family portraits go, this one is a classic.

Which proves the rule about appearances and deceptiveness.

Mr. and Mrs. Average Canadian -- that is, David Hoare and Heather Jopling -- boast what is an emphatically non-average familial distinction in this age of shifting social landscapes. With the resumption of Parliament tomorrow and news that the Conservatives are poised to reopen debate on same-sex marriage, these average Canadians look more like Stephen Harper's worst nightmare.

"We're another chapter of alternative families," says Jopling, 38, a writer, actor and former Ottawan. "We're straights, we've got our one child, we've got pets, we own a house, we've got cars -- and we just also happen to have been a surrogate and a sperm donor for gay and lesbian families."

It is a late-summer day at a rented Gatineau cottage. Nearby, Rissa is playing with eight-year-old Klara, the half-sister of her half-sister. The sounds of handclapping and a singsong chant drift out over the lake.

In 2003, Hoare was a sperm donor for Toronto lesbian friends Virginia West and Cheryl Reid, who are today the doting parents of Rowan, their two-year-old son. A few months after that, Jopling offered to become surrogate mother for the child their gay friends in Ottawa, Michael Mancini and Ernst Hupel, were hoping for. That couple's daughter Milena is now 19 months old, little sister to Klara, Hupel's daughter with another surrogate mother.

The three families maintain contact and get together from time to time, despite the geography that separates them, openly acknowledging all their connections. Rissa knows, for instance, that she has a half-brother in Rowan (whose birthday she shares) and a half-sister in Milena, both of whom will be told the same thing when they get older. Last month, the three families spent some cottage time together in the Outaouais.

It's one big, noisy, extended family, says Jopling, a rainbow of happy diversity that has come to feel like the most natural thing in the world. "My daughter doesn't know that there's anything different about her family," she says, smiling.

(The diversity runs even deeper. Hoare's parents split up when his mother, an Anglican priest, came out as a lesbian. She and her partner, along with Hoare's father and his new partner -- who have introduced Jamaican and Filipino influences into the family portrait -- have provided Jopling with three wonderful mothers-in-law, she says, and extended Rissa's grandparental range. On Jopling's side, there are only two grandparents, though her father, a retired Air Force lieutenant-colonel, adds the variety of a military touch to the cultural mixed bag.)

But while it may have come to seem natural to Jopling, there is no denying the extraordinariness of her extended family situation, which has placed two new little beings into two different families.

In both cases, the spark of new life was ignited in a spirit of friendship and the shared conviction that this was the right thing to do. No money changed hands, and no doctors were involved.

It began with Reid and West, respectively a 39-year-old musician and public-school teacher, and a 36-year-old actor and graphic designer. The two Toronto women, formerly from Ottawa, had been exploring pregnancy for West. After two male friends decided that, no, they didn't think they could handle being sperm donors, the couple decided to try in vitro fertilization. They stuck with the fertility clinic for about two years.

"Then it started feeling weird," says West. "It felt like a big baby-making factory." The same donor descriptions cropped up over and over, which gave them pause, and they didn't like how the doctor started to push fertility drugs when West didn't get pregnant after two tries. They went back to thinking about sperm donation from a friend.

A chance encounter with Hoare and Jopling at a Christmas party -- West and Jopling had acted together in Ottawa at the Great Canadian Theatre Company and elsewhere, and the two couples were friendly -- resulted in Hoare agreeing to biological fatherhood for West and Reid's planned baby.

"It was a four-month process," recalls Jopling. "Virginia and Cheryl would come to Cobourg when Virginia was ovulating, and we'd get our little -- well, it wasn't a turkey baster, it was a syringe. All very low tech. David would be in one room, and he'd do his thing. Then we'd give them their little syringe. It took four tries, and she got pregnant."

Shortly after, at another Christmas party the following year, Jopling found herself comparing parenting notes with Hupel, a popular Ottawa interior designer and the partner of Mancini, another of Jopling's actor friends. Already the father of young Klara, Hupel told Jopling he and Mancini hoped to have another child.

On the way home, with their three-year-old conked out in the back seat, Jopling told her husband that she thought she could be a surrogate mother for her friends. He was skeptical, she recalls, doubtful she could give up the baby and curious about her motivation.

"He quizzed me on it, and I said, 'Well, I think what it comes from is the idea of being able to give this baby to a family that deserves to have a baby. My philosophy of parenting is that parents who are good at what they do are the type of parents who should have as many kids as they can afford to have, as many kids as they can raise.'"

Mancini and Hupel were ecstatic. Jopling's only hesitation lay in the schedule of the Northumberland Players, the local community theatre group of which she is currently president. They were mounting a production of Man of La Mancha that winter that she really wanted to do. But with age a factor, and after realizing such a delay could push the birth back as long as two years, she decided to go ahead.

Her father, Alex Jopling, says he and his wife shared the concern. "To be honest, the only problem for us was her age and the question of her health." She was in her mid-30s and her first child had been delivered by Caesarean section. Their worries were entirely parental. "It wasn't anything to do with the surrogacy. Not at all."

Mancini and Hupel travelled to Cobourg from Ottawa, and the low-tech syringe method was employed again, this time with Mancini off in one room doing his thing. "We tried twice before I got pregnant," recalls Jopling.

She admits it was unsettling the first time. Lying there with her knees propped up, she said it was bizarre to realize the sperm of another man, not her husband, was inside her. "It was definitely a weird feeling."

When she delivered in Cobourg's hospital, the birthing suite was crowded -- her midwife, a midwifery student, her husband and both new fathers all in the room.

"It was very magical, but also very difficult," Hupel, 38, remembers. "Here's this person who makes you think you've won the lottery for the second time, and she's going through all this incredible pain. All the pictures taken that day show Michael and me with this I'm-so-sorry look on our faces."

It was a pretty big deal for little Cobourg, Jopling says. "The birthing suite became 'the room where the surrogate is, with the gay fathers.' But they were all very good, really good. The nurses we dealt with the next morning were all very helpful and very respectful. There were no weird looks or comments."

She says handing the baby over to the new fathers was not upsetting, as some people might think, and the occasional weepiness she felt during the next little while was simply normal and familiar post-partem emotionalism.

She and Hoare are content with their single-child family, especially with the extended links, and will have no more children of their own. Given her age, she will not be a surrogate again, and Hoare has since had a vasectomy. But they are pleased they were able to do what they did, when they did.

"We want to give them the Breeders' Cup," jokes West ("breeders" is the gay term for heterosexuals). "They deserve to be recognized for their contributions to gayness everywhere." Then she adds more seriously, "But really, we owe them so much."

Both couples can't say enough good about Hoare and Jopling, especially the latter, who did the real heavy lifting over nine laborious months.

Jopling says she ran into someone recently who had just learned she'd been a surrogate mother. "She said to me, 'That's a pretty big thing,' and I said, 'Oh no, not

really.' And she said, 'No, Heather, that's a big deal -- a really big deal.' But I had never thought of it as being an extraordinary thing to do, because I don't consider myself an extraordinary person. It just felt like the right thing to do."

Jopling's father says his daughter was always stubborn, determined and imbued with a sense of fair play, adding, "I like to think that's the way we brought her up in the Jopling household."

Mancini waxes a little more poetic. "Sometimes there are angels who walk this Earth, and sometimes you just bump into them."

n n n

You would think that those who are always talking about family values would want to create an environment of permanent relationships for people of the same sex. But they're not advocating family values. They're advocating their values.

-- Willie Brown, former mayor of San

Francisco

Margaret Somerville, McGill University's controversial ethicist, worries about the children. Her fears stem from her conviction that marriage institutionalizes the "inherently procreative relationship between a man and a woman" (she means marriage in its larger symbolic sense, not individual marriages that may or may not be procreative), and children are a fundamental part of it.

She has called same-sex marriage "a radical social experiment" that deprives children of the mother and father to whom they have an intrinsic right. The right of children to know their biological parents and preferably be raised by them, she has said on different occasions, trumps the right of adults to same-sex marriages. It follows, then, that children raised in a same-sex household must be children who are being deprived of the family life to which they have a right.

But that's not how Jopling sees it.

"You make your family. With an extended family, you decide who you welcome into it."

West's definition of family incorporates that view. "I think it's any group of people that loves each other and can count on each other -- people you celebrate with and grieve with."

That is substantially the position taken by Ottawa's respected Vanier Institute of the Family. It defines family as "any combination of two or more persons who are bound together over time by ties of mutual consent, birth and/or adoption or placement," assuming physical, social and emotional responsibility for each other.

But such loose definitions do not sit well with many conservatives. In the United States, a document called Marriage and the Law: A Statement of Principles has just been released. The document calls for marriage to be strongly protected in law as the union of man and woman exclusively. This would ensure the protection of children, who need "the loving marital unions of their mother and father."

The statement reflects the opinions of more than 100 conservative family and family law scholars in the U.S., including such heavyweights as Mary Ann Glendon, the Harvard law professor honoured by George W. Bush and mentioned as one of his possible Supreme Court candidates.

For Jopling and Hoare, West and Reid, Mancini and Hupel, such conservative positions fail to take the messiness of reality into account. They also fail to grasp the powerful upside of loving family ties in same-sex households.

Jopling sees the heart of the problem as ignorance, a word she uses without its usual pejorative tint. Many people simply don't get it because they simply don't know any differently. They are hemmed in experientially, possibly by the influences of their generation, or neighbourhood, or workplace community. It takes an effort of will to rise above such organic ignorance, she suggests.

People who don't "can stagnate, can stop recognizing or accepting change. They don't want to get out of their comfort zone."

She likes to cite her 62-year-old father as a shining example of change and growth. (Not her 61-year-old mother Carolyn, though, because she says her mother never needed to change. "My mother is and has been, for as long as I can remember, one of the most accepting advocates for everything. I don't remember her ever telling me that you're not supposed to be prejudiced, but I remember knowing it by her example.")

"My father is military and was incredibly homophobic. He wrote a (university) paper in the '70s about how homosexuality is a disease." Before she and Hoare married, she worried about how the first meeting would go between her parents and Hoare's mother and her lesbian partner.

"But it went fine. We had Easter dinner with them, and it went fine because they're all intelligent people. And afterward, I said to my dad, 'Thank you so much for being open-minded and welcoming,' and he said, 'Well, they didn't make any cracks about the military, so I didn't make any cracks about lesbians.' But for him, that's a big deal. And for him to have a close acquaintance with Michael and Ernst, that's pretty big."

When he met the two men for the first time, he presented each with a cigar to celebrate the baby.

The Ottawa men and their daughters sometimes visit the Joplings in Perth, where the older couple has retired. While Mancini and Alex Jopling play golf together, Hupel and the kids stay behind with Carolyn Jopling. She has been known to pick up a few decorating tips from him on such occasions.

Alex Jopling says he considers Milena a granddaughter, though at a slight remove. "This is Heather's daughter, so it's our granddaughter." But he and his wife respect the fact they are not part of the primary families. "We don't want to intrude."

Heather Jopling thinks it's remarkable how her father moved beyond both his generational bias and homophobic attitudes that may have been reinforced in the military. But Alex Jopling doesn't believe he really had far to travel.

"I always believed people are people. Once you get to know them, you just become aware of their human traits."

'Klara has only ever known two fathers,' Michael Mancini says

Continued from PAGE B5

Love is 'the only genuine force that binds individuals together in pursuit of common purpose and meaningful lives lived with and for others.'

-- The Vanier Institute of the Family

Most of the time, Mancini is just plain baffled by the critics who think he and Hupel can't possibly be fit parents or bring up their daughters with any degree of healthy normalcy.

"Sometimes I don't know what to say," sighs the 30-year-old actor and Ottawa native. "If they were to live in my house for one week, they wouldn't think the way they do. The proof is right here. Klara has only ever known two fathers, and she's an incredibly well-adjusted little girl. She knows she has a papa and a daddy, and she's not shy about that with her friends."

Both fathers are actively involved in their kids' lives, volunteering at Klara's school and getting to know her friends and their families. There's a dog, the usual familial chaos and approximately the same quota of joys and upsets found in any household consisting of two busy parents and two lively young daughters.

He apologizes for the cliche he is about to use. "It's all about love. Everything else is useless."

McGill's Somerville disagrees. In a July interview, she talked about what she believes is the damaging experience of children raised by same-sex couples. "This is not a very popular thing that I say," she told Maclean's magazine, "but as important as love is -- and it's immensely important -- it's not enough."

West is confused by that. "I don't know what she means. We need to be happy as humans. We can't just subsist -- we need happiness to thrive. And I don't know what makes you happier than love."

Mancini's parents and grandparents seem to be on the same wavelength. He talks about the reaction of his parents when he first came out as a gay man at age 18: a rocky first few months, followed by continuing and unqualified support. They did worry about the reaction of his traditional grandparents, though, Italian immigrants now in their 80s. They asked Mancini at the time not to say anything.

Then he and Hupel decided to tie the knot. "And there was no way I was getting married without my grandparents there." So at age 27, he paid them a visit and told them he was gay and getting married. "To my utter surprise," he laughs, "they were more accepting right off the top than anybody I've ever known."

They came to the wedding, he says, and had a wonderful time. And they pay frequent visits to the home their grandson shares with Hupel and the two girls, one of them their great-granddaughter.

In fact, says Mancini, after initial concerns about how the two men and their family might be treated in the community, the overall reaction of Mancini's family to the arrival of Milena has been one of "unbridled joy."

In Toronto, young Rowan is also growing up swathed in love. Although his mom (Reid) and mommy (West) have not yet married, they plan to eventually, probably when their son is old enough to participate in the ceremony. But they have evolved into a solid nuclear unit.

Rowan has always had a stay-at-home parent (West the first year, Reid last year, and West this fall as Reid returns to teaching), a situation they plan to maintain until he begins part-time nursery school. And he is clearly a classic incarnation of pride and joy.

Allowing herself a moment of justifiable bragging, West notes that Rowan has been both an early walker and an early talker, a toddler who has been speaking in full sentences for months now. He can count to 30 in English and to 10 in both French and Spanish, the latter thanks to Dora the Explorer. He loves to play drums, just like Mom (Reid).

As Rowan gets older, says West, she and Reid will be very clear about where he came from and what his connections are to Hoare -- and to Rissa and to Jopling -- whom they visit several times a year.

"It means a lot to us to know that there's family out there for Rowan. The more people to love this child, the better."

That's the way Mancini and Hupel see it, too. Nor do they believe children should be brought up surrounded by just men or just women. Kids need both male and female peers and role models, Mancini says.

"A dad can't be a mom." That's why they make sure there are always plenty of family members from both sexes in frequent contact with their daughters. His mother, he says, is a towering influence. "She does things that only a woman can do. But that doesn't mean that two dads can't raise a child."

Jopling likes to tell of the time her father-in-law came to visit just as she was embarking on her surrogate pregnancy. When he expressed misgivings about the enterprise, he was set straight by his five-year-old granddaughter. "Rissa said, 'Grandpa, sometimes two mommies want to have a baby but they can't do it by themselves, so they need a daddy to help them. Daddy helped Virginia and Cheryl. And sometimes two daddies want to have a baby, but they need a mommy to help, so Mommy's helping Michael and Ernst.' That was a no-brainer for her."

n n n

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

-- George Bernard Shaw

As an actor in Ottawa, Heather Jopling was known for her wit, her versatility and general onstage pizzazz. A graduate of the University of Ottawa's theatre department, she helped found A Company of Fools, the city's uniquely irreverent Shakespearean troupe. Among other things, she has also staged a number of one-woman shows based on personal experience, including Five Years Behind in My Five Year Plan, How to Leave Adolescence at 30 and, more recently, More Work than a Puppy, about parenthood. As a writer, she has produced short stories, one-act plays, screenplays, even an unpublished romance novel ("just to see if I could do it") and children's stories.

But she has never been political. Until now.

"I have this true belief that an encompassing and inclusive community can make the world a better place," she explains. "When Stephen Harper got elected, I thought, 'Oh no. Now I'm going to have to become politically active. And I don't want to become politically active.'"

But that's what she has become, in a kind of back-door way. Apart from speaking out publicly about her support for alternative family configurations, Jopling has just completed a series of three children's books devoted to the subject. Colourfully illustrated by two professional artists, the books deal with the joys of diversity (The Not-So-Only-Child) and life with same-sex parents (Ryan's Mom is Tall and Monicka's Papa is Tall). All the characters, despite slight name changes, are modelled on the three families that constitute her own broadly extended family.

She is publishing the books herself, she says, because she doesn't think the issue should go onto the back burner for the one to three years it could take for a Canadian publisher to accept, print and distribute them.

But that means she has to get out there and promote both the books and the cause they reflect. "I hate having to sell things. I've hated it since the days I had to sell chocolate bars at school. But selling the idea of these books, selling the idea of acceptance, is really easy. That's something I never anticipated.

"The kind of advocacy that I find myself involved in now is odd for me, because I never pictured myself as any kind of lobbyist. But I find I've been waving the rainbow pride flag like you wouldn't believe."

For Hupel, the selling is slightly softer. Quietly and with little fanfare, he simply challenges people's erroneous and unthinking assumptions. When he brought his older daughter into CHEO last winter with an ear infection, the nurse asked a confused Klara if her mommy had given her any medication. With his gentle correction, that nurse may now be thinking twice before assuming a child with her father must have a mother at home.

But for all its nurturing love, the desirability of the Hupel-Mancini household is rejected outright by Marriage and the Law, the new document released by American conservatives. In a section condemning the "Family Diversity Model" -- the model embraced by current U.S. family law -- the statement says it is a failure that has led to a spate of social problems involved with family break-up, and the emasculation of American boys. It concludes the section with the recognition that "we can respect all families struggling to raise decent children." But it advocates "striving towards an ideal in which each year more children are born to and raised by their own mother and father joined in a lasting, loving marital union."

The words echo those of George W. Bush, who has frequently stated that marriage is an exclusively male-female institution, and who has said that "the welfare of children and the stability of society" are a function of the "commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another." At the Vatican recently, Pope Benedict XVI gave Ontario bishops a piece of his mind about Canada's decision to legalize the "folly" of same-sex marriage, which he called an "ephemeral social trend."

In Canada, if they can get the numbers in the House of Commons, Stephen Harper's Conservatives are committed to a policy of reversing the legislation passed in June 2005 legalizing civil marriages between same-sex couples. The effect, by extension, would formally devalue same-sex family life.

Whatever misgivings she may have had previously about engaging publicly in the debate, Jopling has clearly found her political voice. "I think," she ventures, "that Mr. Harper and the Conservative government have to come into the new millennium and recognize that the face of the family is changing."

And, she adds, the change is occurring whether or not he and like-minded conservatives approve of it. "Pretty soon, it's no longer going to be acceptable to say that same-sex marriage is no good."

For Jopling, it's all about justice. It is also about hope.

Janice Kennedy is a senior writer at the Citizen.

ONCE UPON A TIME

Heather Jopling's three diversity books for children -- The Not-So-Only-Child, Ryan's Mom is Tall and Monicka's Papa is Tall -- are available in Ottawa at Chapters Rideau, Collected Works, Mother Tongue Books and Kaleidoscope Kids, as well as at After Stonewall. Retail price is $14.95.

The books can also be ordered directly from Jopling's Nickname Press (www.nicknamepress.com).

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